Minimally invasive medical techniques are aimed at reducing the amount of extraneous tissue that is damaged during diagnostic or surgical procedures, thereby reducing patient recovery time, discomfort, and deleterious side effects. The average length of a hospital stay for a standard surgery may also be shortened significantly using minimally invasive surgical techniques. Thus, an increased adoption of minimally invasive techniques could save millions of hospital days, and millions of dollars annually in hospital residency costs alone. Patient recovery times, patient discomfort, surgical side effects, and time away from work may also be reduced with minimally invasive surgery.
To view a surgical site, an endoscopic camera with an illumination means may be inserted into a patient's body. An image sensor in the endoscopic camera captures color images of the surgical site. The small dimensions of the end of the endoscopic camera can limit the size of the image sensor down to a single integrated circuit chip with a limited number of camera pixels. It is difficult to capture high-resolution color images with a single chip with such limited dimensions.
The color images of the surgical site may be shown to a surgeon on a monitor or a display. A surgeon may want to see a magnified region of the color images captured by the image sensor. A digital zoom may be used to magnify the region. While a digital zoom may magnify regions of the images captured by the sensor, a loss of resolution or sharpness in the magnified region can occur.
It is desirable to provide a high-resolution image output to display on a display device from images captured by an image sensor.